Foreign Bodies
Author(s): Cynthia Ozick (Baruch College)
Cynthia Ozick is a literary treasure. In her sixth novel, she retraces Henry James's The Ambassadors and delivers a brilliant, utterly new American classic. At the center of the story is Bea Nightingale, a fiftyish divorced schoolteacher whose life has been on hold during the many years since her brief marriage. When her estranged, difficult brother asks her to travel to Europe to retrieve a nephew she barely knows, she becomes entangled in the lives of his family. Over the course of a few months she travels from New York to Paris to Hollywood, aiding and abetting her nephew and niece while waging a war of letters with her brother, and finally facing her ex-husband to shake off his lingering sneers from decades past. As she inadvertently wreaks havoc in their lives, every one of them is irrevocably changed.
Product Information
"Ozick's heady fiction springs from her deep critical involvement in literature, especially her fascination with Henry James, which emboldened her to lift the plot of his masterpiece, The Ambassadors, and recast it in a taut and flaying novel that is utterly her own....Ozick's dramatic inquiry into the malignance of betrayal; exile literal and emotional; the many tentacles of anti-Semitism; and the balm and aberrance of artistic obsession is brilliantly nuanced and profoundly disquieting."- Booklist
"Raucous, funny, ferocious, and tragic. A literary master, as James was, Ozick makes all those qualities fit together seamlessly, and with heartbreaking effect."- Philadelphia Inquirer
"Dazzling, even masterful." - Entertainment Weekly
"An absorbing achievement ... A nimble, entertaining literary homage, but it is also, chillingly, what James would have called 'the real thing.'" - New York Times Book Review
General Fields
- :
- : Mariner Books
- : Mariner Books
- : 0.254
- : 30 September 2010
- : 203mm X 135mm X 17mm
- : United States
- : books
Special Fields
- : Cynthia Ozick (Baruch College)
- : Paperback
- : 813.54
- : very good
- : 255